I see why as we break out from the cover of the trees. A mountain vista spreads before me, beautiful in its layers of blue and purple. We run along a high ridge. Not high enough that a change in oxygen levels would be immediately noticeable, but I have trained on the seashore, at the very lowest elevations. Now that my body is working so hard, the thousands of feet in difference announce themselves plainly.
And our trail is leading upward.
“That was our warmup,” Captain Alston says as he kicks it in.
I follow. Far below, the shapes of rock and tree bleed into one another, formless and murky, and distant lights congregate in what must be a settlement. If I had any extra energy to devote to it, I would delight in the view. But I am struggling mightily, perspiration pouring off me in rivulets. My body temperature rises far faster than I can account for. The air is cool and my clothing lightweight, but I feel like I’m running in an insulated snowsuit. I glance at my watch; we have only covered one more mile since the last time I checked.
By now my eyes have fully adjusted to the lack of light. We run through glades of beech, oak, maple, poplar, and clump after clump of rhododendrons, their bright pink flowers muted in the predawn gloom. The forms and fragrances of the foliage are familiar to me. Some of the same species grow on the heights surrounding the cove outside 56; others I remember from my early years. The vistas that open before us, the crags and winding mountain paths, they are all like dreams of long ago. Memories my mind has not forgotten. I wonder how far from here I grew up.
After two more miles, I am falling farther and farther behind. The thinner air and the rugged terrain have robbed me of my vitality, not to mention the dehydration caused by my inexplicable retention of heat. But I cannot lose Captain Alston or I may not find my way home. So I tug my sleeves as high as they will go, tuck my shirt up into my bra, and struggle on, staying close enough to my guide to hear the crash of his steps over the cacophony of my own breathing.
My stomach is heaving, my muscles feel shot up with acid, and someone is jabbing a knife into my left shoulder. By the time the dark bulk of the headquarters building comes back into view, I am on the verge of collapse. When I finally stagger to a halt, I drop to my knees, hunched over and gasping. We’ve only run five miles.
Captain Alston is waiting for me, as cool as if he’s just completed a leisurely jog. I hear the mockery in his voice as he calls out my time. “Thirty-three minutes and twenty-one seconds.”
Nearly three and a half minutes slower than my Exam fail.
That’s when I realize he’s done it on purpose. He’s seen my scores. And he’s planned this run first, at this particular distance, as a way to mock me. To show me that I don’t belong. I am too ashamed and too exhausted to challenge him. I simply suck air into my oxygen-starved lungs like a drowning man pulled from the sea.
“I hope you haven’t gotten the idea that this is going to be a walk in the park just because you somehow circumvented the Exam. I’m not keen on babysitting civilians, especially those who don’t even have the sense to wear their clothing the right side out.”
I glance at my sleeve and finger the material, not sure what he’s talking about.
“A little warm out here this morning?” he asks with an undeniable smirk. “The fabric conducts heat in one direction. Wear it correctly, and it’s as cool as a summer breeze. Get it wrong and you’ll boil in your own body heat. Nice in January. Not so fun in July.”
“You knew?” I gasp out. “And you didn’t tell me?”
“I believe experience is the greatest teacher.”
I glare at him as I whip off my shirt and put it on the right way. I’m instantly cooler.
He seems miffed, as if I’ve issued him some kind of challenge. His eyes narrow. “If it were up to me, you’d be packing your bags to go home, Miss Holloway. But if you’re here to stay, I’ll make sure you put in the identical effort as any Initiate.”
My breath is finally coming a little easier. “That’s what this is? Initiate training?” I ask. “The same as the new class is receiving?”
“Not one bit less.” He says it smugly, like it’s an answer I don’t want to hear when in fact it gives me the boost I need. Whatever I’m suffering, Will is somewhere doing the same thing. The thought of this togetherness, no matter how distant, lifts my mood like nothing else could have.
“It used to be called boot camp,” Captain Alston continues, “though I’m not sure why. I prefer pain camp. Or I-wish-I-were-dead camp.”
It’s another attempt to grind me down, to kill my spirit, but I just grin up at him. He skews his eyes suspiciously before jerking open the door. “Same time tomorrow, Holloway. We’ll see if you’re still smiling at the end of the week.”
SEVEN
I shower, eat breakfast, and make my way to the gymnasium for the 6:30 lesson listed on my schedule. At least this will be led by Captain Chase. When she meets me, however, this is not the same woman with the seductive voice I met at dinner yesterday evening. This is a combat officer instructing an underling. She is brisk and no-nonsense. “You are one minute late. You will give me two sit-ups for every second of instruction time you have wasted.”
Instead of telling her we’ll now be starting three minutes late instead of one, I drop and perform the required punishment. When I have finished in quick order, she nods and says, “Tomorrow you will be here on time, Miss Holloway.”
“Jack,” I correct her. She just hands me three short-bladed knives.
“We will begin with non-technical weapons. These are basic throwing knives. They are used in close combat situations and effective up to ten meters. It requires an eye for distance, accuracy, and an ability to judge the necessary amount of spin.” She hefts one by the blade and sends it whirling into a wooden target. “The advantage of such a weapon is that you may avoid closing with an enemy. The disadvantage, of course, is that it leaves your possession. It is considered a secondary option when others are spent.”
I am given all three knives, instructed in the particulars of their use, and spend the next twenty minutes sending them clattering across the room. They land everywhere but in the target. Apparently, I have no eye for distance, no accuracy, and zero ability to judge spin. My arm begins to feel the strain before Captain Chase moves on to hand combat.
“We’ll work on defense first,” she says. “The number one rule of knife fighting is to give yourself room to move. If you get in a tight situation, you’ll probably end up dead. Believe me, I’ve seen the lethal damage a knife can do. Stay back, avoid contact, and attempt to disarm your attacker. Let’s try it.” She picks up a black marker and pulls off the cap. A chemical smell permeates the air around us. “This is my blade. Try to avoid being hit with it.”
She comes at me slowly, her “knife” at the ready. I back up, circling with her, ducking and dodging her thrusts. There’s poetry in the motion; we’re like a pair of dancers. After my unsuccessful throws, it’s even kind of fun.
“Concentrate on striking the forearm or wrist of my knife arm,” she instructs. “Don’t try to block me. That will only result in injury. You want to knock the weapon away while avoiding the blade. Grab, kick, strike. Do whatever’s necessary to disarm your opponent while minimizing your loss of blood by staying out of reach.”
She’s still moving slowly, and I pantomime the motions.
“Very good,” she says. “Now let’s pick up the pace. Remember—avoid and disarm.”
Her movements become much harder to follow. I try to keep up, ducking, dodging, practicing the unfamiliar movements. Very soon, my hands and sleeves are covered with black marks. My torso would be, too, if my shirt wasn’t already black.
“Try to anticipate my movements. If I come at you low, strike down on my wrist. If I come high, knock me aside. Strike fast and hard, but keep stepping back, avoiding the blade.”
Her thrusts come at me like viper bites, and I am soon panting with the exertion. I’m hopelessly outmatched. When she slashes acr
oss my neck, leaving a black gash that would have surely beheaded me, she finally eases up.
“Not bad,” she says, though I can see the truth on her face. I have no instincts for this, either. “Let’s try some offense.”
We work for two hours. By the end of our session, she’s taught me the five best places to skewer a person, how to twist the blade to ensure the most internal damage, and how to drag strikes across my opponent’s body to maximize blood loss. The problem is, when the pressure’s on, I can’t seem to remember any of them. Though I now have possession of the marker, Captain Chase is remarkably unscathed.
“Again, Miss Holloway. Quick, hard thrusts.”
My arms ache from the unaccustomed use, and I’m tired from my disastrous morning run. I try the technique again only to hear my instructor’s heavy sigh. “Our time is up. We’ll work on it again tomorrow. You are dismissed.”
I head straight to the locker room for another shower. Obviously, I’m glad we weren’t using real weapons, but the thing about the marker is that everyone I pass in the hallway knows exactly what I’ve been doing, and they are all fully aware that I totally suck at it. After the first few glances of curiosity and amusement, I duck my head and avoid all eye contact.
Another thing about the marker, it doesn’t come off in the shower.
Immediately after, I have classroom time with Major Wendell Norvis, a middle-aged man with a comb-over and a voice that hits my ears like a sledgehammer. He lets me know he’s fourth in command at Axis, which doesn’t impress me but does give me the impression that he’s got his sights set higher. The lecture, delivered at full volume, is mostly a brainwashing session emphasizing the history of Capernica and my duties of loyalty and service, but at least I get to sit down. It would probably be easier to take if the room had been full of other students who could share the brunt of his sermonizing. As things stand, it’s just me and Norvis.
He’s been droning on for a while, and I’m staring up at him glassy-eyed, having totally lost the thread of what he’s saying. He must see his words bouncing off the back of my skull because he suddenly leans on the table in front of me, eyeball to eyeball. “And can you tell me why we have the caste system, Miss Holloway?”
“Jack,” I say. The correction has about as much effect as it’s had on Captain Chase and Captain Alston. I sigh. “We have the caste system for the benefit of Capernica. With the economic destruction and food and service shortages following the Provocation, a method was needed to ensure recovery. Governor Macron and the Capernican Council decided the best way to do this would be to group the laborers into categories and freeze them in place so vocations would carry on through families. This would guarantee the most fundamental tasks in society would always be filled. A mandatory Examination would then filter out the strongest and brightest to be moved upward.”
He looks at me sideways. “You were paying attention.”
No, I’ve just heard it a million times.
“And why should the brightest and strongest be filtered into Military?”
It is yet another reminder that I have failed to distinguish myself. But I hold the answer ready. “Capernica’s armed forces must be strong in the event that the Provocation ever repeats itself.”
He nods in satisfaction, as if taking full credit for having imparted this knowledge to me. He really is an idiot. I roll my eyes when he turns his back and hope he is the exception to the Military norm.
Next comes an hour and a half of drill, again with Norvis, and I decide drill instructor is a great career choice for someone who likes to hear himself talk as much as he does. However, if a class of one is awkward, a drill of one is worse. I feel magnificently stupid changing position alone each time he shouts out a command.
“Attention!”
My body snaps upright in a crisp row of…me.
“Forward, march!”
I step out alone.
“Right face!”
Solitary again.
“Halt!”
Sigh. It’s kind of ridiculous. I’m far better at this than I am at wielding a knife, though it strikes me as utterly useless.
After an eternity, I get through the session and break for lunch, and that aloneness factor carries over into the mess hall. It’s sort of like being the new kid at school, only worse, because my peers are all looking at my maroon sleeves out of the corners of their eyes and wondering how I got into the building in the first place.
Afternoon passes very much like morning. More drill with Norvis. Instruction in the Capernican legal code with some mid-level officer whose name I can’t remember. Then a session in the weight room with the personable and seriously buff Colonel Pierce Padrillo. Colonel Padrillo rescues the day from being a total loss. He’s the one person who gives me a genuine smile and actually calls me by my given name the first time I ask. I was starting to wonder if there was a rule about that. Maybe there is and Padrillo is just a rebel. He does wear his black hair in waves that reach his shoulders. Or maybe he’s close enough to retiring to an office job not to care. Seriously, if he was fifteen years younger, I’d have a major crush.
As nice as Padrillo comes across, his class is tough. By dinner, I have lifted the approximate weight of an aeropod and am mentally and physically drained. I eat alone again, this time by choice. I take my tray to a corner table where I can simply concentrate on forking the food into my mouth. I’m halfway finished when I see Captain Alston come in. I turn away, but I’m too late. His eyes rake over me, taking in my weary posture, my falling-apart braid, and the plethora of drawn-on stab wounds that mark my body, and his lips curl upward in amusement.
My food sours in my stomach. While he fills his tray, I empty mine into a trashcan, slip into the hallway, and go directly to the dorm. My holoband says 21:00 lights out. I am dead asleep by eight o’clock.
The next two weeks follow this same basic pattern, except after the first few days I take it upon myself to modify my schedule somewhat. I stop going to class with Norvis, and I skip drill and legal code, as well. I just don’t see the point. I’m here as part of the private sector, not Military. So during those hours, I simply make myself scarce. I would seek out Caedmon, but she’s busy with whatever she does all day and I usually only see her in the evenings. I could sit with her at dinner, I suppose, but I like to wait until the room has cleared out so I don’t chance a run-in with one of my instructors.
It’s not at all the existence I imagined for myself when I boarded that aeropod two weeks ago. I live in this gray area where Military meets civilian. I’m not really walking in either world, I have no idea where I’m going, and I’m very much alone on the journey. I spend plenty of my hiding-away hours wondering what my family is doing, but mostly I think about how different everything would be if Will and I could have been Initiates together.
He’s filling my mind as I dodge out of weapons training and into the supply room where Captain Alston procured my clothes. On the far side, a door leads to the laundry. I discovered it only yesterday, and in the three hours I spent there, not a single person came in. I kick together a comfortable pile from the sheets and clothing on the floor and drop onto it with my notebook. The first few pages hold my notes from Major Norvis’s initial lecture. The rest are scribbled with all the things I’d like to say to Will if I could.
I close my eyes and let my thoughts wander back to the day he boarded the ship for Macron. He’d kissed me awake that morning in the blackest hour before dawn. It was magical, opening my eyes on the bow of the trawler, the blanket dew-wet and Will warm beside me. I drifted back into dreamy fuzziness with the taste of his kisses on my lips. But he didn’t let me linger there for long.
“We need to get the trawler back to Mr. Mansley before dawn,” he’d whispered against my ear.
Reluctantly, I dragged myself from my sleepy twilight. The eastern horizon wasn’t even silver yet when Will pulled in the anchor and got the ship underway. I curled up in the blanket and sat as close to him as I could possi
bly press.
I hardly left his side that whole morning, savoring every single moment. When he boarded his ship at noon, I wanted so desperately to go with him. But I faked a smile as I waved him out to sea. If he wasn’t going to see my face for years, I wanted him to remember it bright and pleasant. No last memory of tears. But my heart had been breaking inside.
It still hasn’t healed.
Two tears slide down my cheeks, one on each side of my face like the twin dirt tracks that run between my house and Will’s. I brush them away just as the door opens and a lanky man with a haystack of yellow hair saunters into the laundry room carrying a pink teacup. Definitely not Military, he wears the garb of the mountain folk I remember from my early years—baggy trousers, leather boots, and a loose button-up shirt. He jolts to a halt, as surprised to see me as I am to see him. His eyes are keen beneath weathered folds of skin. “Get in a knife fight, did you?” he asks. “Looks like you didn’t fare so well.”
I look down at my hands and sleeves. I’ve forgotten about the accumulating black marks. “You aren’t going to turn me in, are you?”
“For what? Sitting on a pile of dirty duds or hiding from the fife and drum?” He strides forward with a wry smile that reveals three or four gaps where teeth should have been. “I’m Opie Wells. I live up the ridge a ways and come in a few days a week to help out. Time was these hills provided for all my needs and I didn’t take a blinkin’ copper from anyone. But these old stumps don’t get me around quite like they used to.”
He shifts a lump of tobacco from one cheek to another, spits into the teacup and sets it aside, then starts unloading the contents of the bins into the huge industrial washing vats. His manner immediately sets me at ease.
“I’m Jack Holloway.”
Recompense (Recompense, book 1) Page 8